And now when she walked through the ship, it seemed to her that the crew was breaking up into small and private groups, groups that rarely interacted. The farm team spent almost all its time in the farms, even eating meals there on the floors, and sleeping (together, rumor had it) among the rows of plants. The medical team had its own suite of rooms and offices and labs in Torus B, and they spent their time in there, absorbed with experiments and observations and consultations with Earth. The flight team was preparing for MOI, running several simulations a day. And the rest were . . . scattered. Hard to find. As she walked around the toruses the rooms seemed emptier than ever before. The D dining hall was never full anymore. And then again in the separated clumps of diners that were there, she noticed arguments broke out fairly frequently, and were hushed with peculiar speed. Private spats, but about what?
Maya herself said less at table, and listened more. You could tell a lot about a society by what topics of conversation came up. In this crowd, the talk was almost always science. Shop talk: biology, engineering, geology, medicine, whatever. You could chat forever about that stuff.
But when the number of people in a conversation fell below four, she noticed, the topics of conversation tended to change. Shop talk was augmented (or replaced entirely) by gossip; and the gossip was always about those two great forms of the social dynamic, sex and politics. Voices lowered, heads leaned in, and word got around. Rumors about sexual relations were becoming more common and more quiet, more caustic and more complex. In a few cases, as in the unfortunate triangle of Janet Blyleven, Mary Dunkel and Alex Zhalin, it went very public and became the talk of the ship; in others it stayed so hidden that the talk was in whispers, accompanied by pointed, inquisitive glances. Janet Blyleven would walk into the dining hall with Roger Calkins, and Frank would remark to John, in an undertone meant to reach Maya’s ears, “Janet thinks we’re a panmixia.” Maya would ignore him, as she always did when he spoke in that sneery tone of voice, but later she looked up the word in a sociobiology lexicon, and found that a panmixia was a group where every male mated with every female.
The next day she looked at Janet curiously; she had had no idea. Janet was friendly, she leaned in at you as you talked, and really paid attention. And she had a quick smile. But . . . well, the ship had been built to insure a lot of privacy. No doubt there was more happening than anyone could know.
And among these secret lives, might there not be another secret life, led in solitude, or in teamwork with some few among them, some small clique or cabal?
“Have you noticed anything funny lately?” she asked Nadia one day at the end of their regular breakfast chat.
Nadia shrugged. “People are bored. It’s about time to get there, I think.”
Maybe that was all it was.
Nadia said, “Did you hear about Hiroko and Arkady?”
Rumors were constantly swirling about Hiroko. Maya found it distasteful, disturbing. That the lone Asian woman among them should be the focus of that kind of thing— dragon lady, mysterious Orient . . . Underneath the scientific rational surfaces of their minds, there were so many deep and powerful superstitions. Anything might happen, anything was possible.
Like a face seen through a glass.
And so she listened with a tight feeling in her stomach, as Sasha Yefremov leaned over from the next table and responded to Nadia’s question by wondering if Hiroko were developing a male harem. That was nonsense; although an alliance of some sort between Hiroko and Arkady had an unsettling sort of logic to Maya, she was not sure why. Arkady was very open in advocating independence from Mission Control, Hiroko never talked about it at all, but in her actions hadn’t she already led the whole farm team away, into a mental torus the others could never enter?
But then when Sasha claimed in a low voice that Hiroko had plans to fertilize several of her own ova with sperm from all the men on the Ares, and store them cryonically for later growth on Mars, Maya could only sweep up her tray and head for the dishwashers, feeling something like vertigo. They were becoming strange.
• • •
The red crescent grew to the size of a quarter, and the feeling of tension grew as well, as if it were the hour before a thunderstorm, and the air charged with dust and creosote and static electricity. As if the god of war were really up there on that blood dot, waiting for them. The green wall panels inside the Ares were now flecked with yellow and brown, and the afternoon light was thick with sodium vapor’s pale bronze.
People spent hours in the bubble dome, watching what none among them but John had seen before. The exercise machines were in constant use, the simulations performed with renewed enthusiasm. Janet took a swing through the toruses, sending back video images of all the changes in their little world. Then she threw her glasses on a table and resigned her post as reporter. “Look, I’m tired of being an outsider,” she said. “Every time I walk into a room everyone shuts up, or starts preparing their official line. It’s like I was a spy for an enemy!”